Accepted

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Justin Long goes to the head of the class in this college comedy.

By Brent Simon

As anyone who's matriculated will attest &#Array; and perhaps most of all, our current president &#Array; college is almost always as much about the social experience and maturation as the educational value. It's the intermediate weigh station between the silly, insular, sewing circle politics of high school and the crushing, rat race actuality of real life, and who hasn't entertained a prolongation of that experience? Moreover, what if there were no institutional controls in place, and you could while away your time with highly elective, course-credit "classes" that consisted of skateboarding, daydreaming, rock 'n' roll posing, girl-watching and the like?

The anarchic college comedy Accepted &#Array; a mash-up of any number of '80s adolescent broadsides, with a healthy pinch of Ferris Bueller's dreamer's disease thrown in &#Array; takes this notion and runs with it, to mostly amusing effect. While both the particulars of its narrative and its execution provide plenty of middling hang-ups, there are &#Array; as the university of life often teaches us &#Array; plenty of enjoyments to be found in the journey.

Accepted centers on enterprising teenager Bartleby, or "B" (a winning Justin Long, of the current Mac/PC commercials and forthcoming fourth installment of Die Hard), an inveterate dreamer and graduating high school senior. After getting rejected by every university to which he applies, B creates a fake college to serve as a temporary refuge. Several of B's friends opt in on his scheme, one designs a fake Web site for the school, and they even secure a brick-and-mortar location courtesy of a local abandoned mental hospital. Voila! Just like that, the South Harmon Institute of Technology is born (and yes, that acronym abbreviation gets a full workout). B's lifelong best friend, Sherman (Jonah Hill), actually gets into a nearby school as a legacy admission, but helps his pal by convincing his burnout uncle Ben (Lewis Black), an angry ex-academic, to pose as the college's dean in a meet-and-greet with B's parents.

In a further, amusingly capricious twist, Sherman accidentally activates a chirpy "Acceptance is only one click away!" link on the aforementioned Web site, and soon, dozens of other college rejects from out of town show up for classes. Naturally, because there has to be a girl, B falls for longtime friend Monica (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' Blake Lively) and she for he; and naturally, because there has to be a villainous dean of a nearby competing college who is angling for a consolidation of space in a land grab, there's the sneering Dean Van Horne (The Silence of the Lambs' Anthony Heald). Against considerable odds, B and his friends forge ahead with maintaining a fake but quasi-functional university, one that operates by their own set of liberal rules.

As the co-screenwriter of deeply loved cult comedic baubles Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, Steve Pink helped locate the unique humor in both violently clashing cultures and slacker ethos, and you'll see some of that same idiosyncratic stamp of personality on this, his directorial debut. Still, despite Pink's best efforts, the movie's narrative track is not a particularly well oiled one. Adults are generally either sternly hectoring or oblivious (sometimes a scene calls for both), and the character of Uncle Ben never codifies into something more than a one-note counterpoint to these cardboard types.

That said, if one downshifts their brain just a slight bit, they can have plenty of fun. Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Mark Perez's script is largely synthetic in some of its scene-to-scene contrivances, but what Accepted most has going for it is a genuine, easygoing, loose-limbed energy &#Array; something I appreciated even more in revisiting this movie for the second time.

Score: 7 out of 10

The Video Presented in anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen, Accepted utilizes a bright color scheme, and this transfer nicely captures its tones without any sort of upper-register compromise. A decent portion of the movie incorporates a few outdoor locations, and the lighting and saturation is constant and unswerving. Resolution is consistent and clear, and there are no problems whatsoever with grain, edge bleeding or artifacting.